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[movies] Crime in Counterpoint: Michael Mann on his Restored Masterpiece Heat …
‘I’ve got a theory, which probably holds no water whatsoever, about why there’s so much genre content in media — meaning police stories, crime stories, so much of that. It’s because of the nature of the medium. Detectives detecting do what writers and directors do in the inverse: We have an idea for a character, and our character has origins that we invent. Those origins become an engine that causes him to do certain activities and express himself and have different attitudes based on who the character is. And then those activities have consequences and leave behind certain effects. But a detective works all the way at the other end. He sees the remains of a crime — the leavings. He starts to work backwards to what happened. What was the activity? And if this was the activity, what could I discover about the motivations of the person whose identity I do not know? And how can those motivations allow me to predict his future activity, so that I can intercept him and find out who he is?’

[movies] Michael Mann Looks Back on His Career … Michael Mann interviewed… ‘Because, though people characterize Heat as a crime thriller, that’s the last thing it is, at least in my mind. It’s a very formally structured drama, and its structure is a character-driven dialectic of Hanna [Al Pacino’s character] and McCauley [Robert De Niro’s character]. Its plot is driven by a crime story and a police story to a certain point, and then it breaks into a kind of chorus. In that chorus, we see slices of these different people’s lives. The fuguelike nature of the narrative is what was so exciting to me. When you’re with McCauley, you are subjectively immersed in his life, and you want what he wants, his expectations, his ambitions — his heart is your heart. You want him to get away. When you’re with Hanna, you want him to intercept McCauley, and you want him to achieve what’s driving him. That the two of them know and like each other while they’re headed for a lethal collision, and that they’re two of the only people who are like each other in the invented universe of this movie, that’s the construction. It’s brutally rigid construction.’

[movies] Michael Mann Interview … the director of Public Enemies interviewed in the Guardian … ‘Public Enemies is the first movie to attempt to disentangle the Dillinger myth from the facts – until now every other filmmaker has, so to speak, printed the legend – and one wonders, in retrospect, why it took Mann this long to get around to it, so well matched are the gangster’s story and the themes and concerns that have animated Mann throughout his career.’

[film] Don’t Let Yourself Get Attached To Anything — a lookback at Michael Mann’s Heat … ‘McCauley is perhaps the part that De Niro played that is closest to the actor’s own personality: a screen, a cipher, depthless, icily professional, lacking in reflexivity, stripped down to pure Method (‘I do what I do best’). When McCauley meets the love interest, Eadey, he is reading a book on metals.’ [via Blackbeltjones Links]

[film] Michael Mann’s Dark World — Brief BBC News profile of the director of Collateral … ‘Collateral displays all the classic Mann themes – the exploration of the male psyche, the blurred lines between good and evil and the disaffection that comes from living in the big city.’

‘…the Mercedes branding of Lucky Star is subtle, verging on imperceptible. Those who watch the trailer and are eager to find out more will unearth not a high-octane thriller, but an invitation to their nearest Mercedes showroom. Whether Mann’s glacé camerawork will then be enough to sustain that interest once they notice the car’s £92,000 price tag is moot. For Mercedes, it is evidently a risk worth taking. The prize, after all, is precious indeed: the neutering of our scepticism when confronted with advertising.’